Change of Heart

by Jodi Picoult

You can track every polarizing issue in this country to religion. Stem cell research, the war in Iraq, the right to die, gay marriage, abortion, evolution, even the death penalty—what’s the fault line? That Bible of yours.”

If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

bishop—Gnostics didn’t think Jesus’s resurrection was literal. To them, Jesus was never really human—he just appeared in human form. But that was just a technicality to the Gnostics, because unlike Orthodox Christians, they didn’t see a gap between the human and the divine. To them, Jesus wasn’t a one-of-a-kind savior—he was a guide, helping you find your individual spiritual potential. And when you reached it, you weren’t redeemed by Christ—you became a Christ. Or in other words: you were equal to Jesus. Equal to God.”

But Fletcher was saying that the most powerful ideas had been subjugated . . . because they jeopardized the existence of the Orthodox Church. That the reason they’d had to be crushed was because—at one point—they’d been as or more

the reason the Church had survived and flourished was not because its ideas were the most valid, but because it had been the world’s first bully.

That’s what religion does. It points a finger. It causes wars. It breaks apart countries. It’s a petri dish for stereotypes to grow in. Religion’s not about being holy,” Shay said. “Just holier-than-thou.”

“You know what religion does? It draws a big fat line in the sand. It says, ‘If you don’t do it my way, you’re out.’” He wasn’t yelling,

It’s the job of humanity to help God by finding and releasing those shards of light—through good deeds and acts. Every time we do, God becomes more perfect—and we become a little more like God.

It’s said to be cheaper to execute a man than to keep him in prison for life—but in fact, when you factor in the cost of eleven years of appeals, paid for with public funds, it costs about a third more to execute a prisoner than to sentence him to life in prison.

a murder in a rural setting is more likely to lead to a death sentence than one that occurs in the

city? Or that the murder of a white victim leads to the death penalty three and a half times more often than the murder of a black victim? Or that women are sentenced to death only two-thirds as often as men?”

“You know why I think we still execute people? Because, even if we don’t want to say it out loud—for the really heinous crimes, we want to know that there’s a really heinous punishment. Simple as that. We want to bring society closer together—huddle and circle our wagons—and that means getting rid of people we think are incapable of learning a moral lesson. I guess the question is: Who gets to identify those people? Who decides what crime is so awful that the only answer is death? And what if, God forbid, they get it wrong?”

What we’re left with is death, with the humanity removed from it.” I hesitated a moment. “So you tell me . . . did this execution really make you feel safer? Did it bring us all closer together? Or did it drive us farther apart?”

The hardest thing in the world is believing someone can change. It’s always easier to go along with the way things are than to admit that you might have been wrong in the first place.”

12. In Change of Heart, religion seems at times to bring characters together and at others to drive a wedge between them. Ultimately, do you think religion unites people or divides them?

got me wondering why religion, which was historically meant to unite people, has become so divisive . . . and why we believe what we do. Who

hope that instead of looking at religion as a set of absolutes, people who read Change of Heart might look at the book as a chance to start a conversation. As for the death penalty, I hope while exploring the reasons that capital punishment is allegedly good for us, we can be honest enough to admit those explanations don’t always stand up to logic—which means that if we keep capital punishment on the law books, we have to admit that it may not be fair, or cheaper, or a deterrent . . . but instead a way for us to permanently exclude from society someone who we think doesn’t belong there with us.

It does seem that is what it comes down to.

A: Maggie, Michael, Lucius, and June correspond with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Shay, as the messianic character, does not have his own voice in a “gospel”—and neither does Jesus in the New Testament.